My Weekly Book

I’d been looking forward to this as something of a treat. Having finally filled in the holes in my Austen reading by completing Sense and Sensibility, Emma and the fragments Sanditon and The Watsons over the course of the last few months I had been promising myself a crack at this very well-received biography, published in 1997, next.

And I found it a satisfying experience, with a few important provisos. The first is that a vast, extended family is central to Jane Austen’s narrative and many of these people shared names. The probably very necessary starting point of the book is a tour through these relations, but inevitably with little accompanying context, which means your early experience of the book is remarkably list-like and hard to assimilate effectively. This meant that my faith in it was shaken quite early on when the author was still engaged with Austen’s infanthood.

And things got worse. When commenting on the practice adopted by the Austen parents of putting their large family of babies out to nurse Tomalin makes some remarks that I found close to risible, including that the eldest sibling, James, may have had a closer relationship with his mother because this did not happen, and that Jane may have been emotionally distanced from her parents as a result of it. Imposing this frankly sentimental modern viewpoint on a family that lived some two hundred years ago, and judging their social customs and constraints by our modern mores and expectations is not something that I feel bodes well in a biography, and in this case it smacks particularly of self-insertion by the author.

But, having struggled through the pages where she treats us to her views on historic child-rearing methods, things did start to look up. Luckily this vast family were letter-writers and diarists, which means that even given the habit of some of Austen’s intimates in destroying her correspondence, there is evidently a vast amount of material available to help us track Austen’s progress at home and while travelling between the homes of her many friends and relations. The biographer’s method of moving from particular incidents to generalities, of trying to stretch the available material into a panorama of a life did occasionally become a little trying. But the resulting panorama was pretty rich and detailed.

Having dealt with the things I found troublesome, it’s time to move on to those aspects of the book that were interesting and engaging. First was the disruption of our customary picture of Jane Austen as a prim and proper, stay-at-home, Tory country lady. Her letters reveal that she was as sharp and cutting as a knife with those she trusted, provocative, impatient, unforgiving and unafraid to make outrageous jokes or unkind if shamefully witty remarks. We are presented with a woman who knew her own mind sufficiently to reject the conventional path of marriage and a large family of children to take the unconventional and also socially and financially risky one of spinsterhood.

While this in some ways restricted her freedom and left her dependent on relatives in other ways it freed her completely and it seems unlikely that we would have had Mansfield Park, Emma or Persuasion had she chosen otherwise. Austen came from a large family of brothers and several of them were widowed after their spouse died giving birth to their eighth, ninth or tenth child. We are presented with a picture of a woman who resisted taking this path herself and was successful in shaping a different kind of life, not always ideal or even satisfactory, but nonetheless providing the essentials for this creative genius.

Equally interesting is the challenge to our standard image of Austen as a stalwart Hampshire Tory. A frequent criticism is that the social order remains little remarked upon in her novels and some readers therefore draw the conclusion that it must be approved of. This is not a reading that I find particularly convincing, but that is not the point at the moment. Tomalin manages to convincingly demonstrate how the meritocratic Austen family built up their own fortunes by hard work and prudence rather than through inherited wealth and family connections, and how they were surrounded by people doing the same.

The author shows how Hampshire at this period was a place in a state of flux, with families arriving and leaving, fortunes being made and lost, households on the rise and households on the wane. It paints a picture of a family inhabiting the fringes of a world which readers of Austen’s novels may have believed her to be at the centre of, and it shows how despite the fact that she was a far from autobiographical author, many events and themes from family and social life have found their way into the novels. There may be no overt commentary on the status of women but anyone appreciating the true situation faced by the Dashwoods when their financial support is cut off, or appreciating why it is so necessary for the Bennet girls to make decent marriages for themselves, may soon see a perspective that is darker, edgier and considerably less straightforward than might at first be suspected. This also explains why Emma Woodhouse’s behaviour towards Harriet Smith is so unforgiveable, as it risks her hopes of a stable future, and how it is doubly shocking from an heiress who will never be in the same position of dependence herself.

Finally I’d like to mention the fascinating deduction made by Tomalin based on a ten-year absence of writing from Austen between the composition of her first three novels and her last three. This was a time during which her parents gave up the family home and led an almost nomadic existence, taking up lodgings at Bath or staying with relatives. Naturally unmarried and financially dependent Jane and Cassandra had no option but to travel where they were bid, more like parcels than people at times. It was not until the Austen women were settled in a home of their own again that Jane apparently had the necessary balance in her life to write. This is even more poignant if you think of Virginia Woolf’s remarks about women authors needing a room of one’s own – Woolf placed Austen second only to Shakespeare in the pantheon of writers in English and further argued that she must have attained a remarkable inner balance and peace in order to create the great art that she did.

An interesting absence from this portrait is Cassandra – she flits around the edges, never clearly delineated, with suggestions that she may have been an awkward personality in her own right and often a drudge for her sisters-in-law with their extensive families, summoned to look after various nephews and nieces during various lyings-in. Also poignant, and remarked upon by many readers, is the highly recognisable process by which Austen faced rejection and setback before achieving moderate success, a small amount of fame and a little money from her writing. Emma, for example, was dedicated to the Prince Regent (a man Austen heartily disliked) after coming to the attention of the royal librarian. We can speculate how this recognition and possession of an income must have seemed to a woman who had spent her whole life socially limited and financially dependent on male relatives, and how the reception of her work must have pleased her. And we can grieve over her untimely death, which may have been from some form of lymphoma, and think to ourselves how, in the accounts of relatives hoping for any sign of recovery that they can take heart in, very little has changed in two hundred years.

But here’s a fascinating question that’s outside Tomalin’s – or any biographer’s – scope, but which I’d love to know the answer to. To what extent was Virginia Woolf right? We can probably surmise that Austen was happy with her creations to the extent that she allowed them to be read by family and friends and to be published, and to the extent that all successful writers have an innate faith in the quality of what they create that prevents the manuscript from being torn up.

But did she have any conception, any inner sense that her novels would one day be called the greatest in the English language? Could this conviction be the source of the artistic coherence that Woolf talks about?

That we can never know, unfortunately.